Magic Deck Vortex: If I Worked at R&D...

Alright, it’s been months since I even touched the writing scene and yet now; on the eve of my move to a new house the bug has hit me – Hard.

So I have come to deliver upon a promise made way back in October 2006 (Really! That long ago….) I come to you now, to create an Alt-play enchantment!

And not just any Alt-Play enchantment, but one capable of putting creatures into play in an abnormal manner, such as Aether Vial, Sneak Attack, Hunting Ground, Tooth and Nail and Cryptic Gate did… Well this is going to be interesting! Here I was thinking there would be a large amount of room to play with but when you look at it, there really are lots of ways to put creatures into play without paying their mana cost and hard casting them.

Now people who have read my earlier articles will know about my power scale but I feel I should include it again just to cover all my bases.

The ‘what were they on!?’ Card – This is the category for those cards you wouldn’t pay someone to take from you. Take One With Nothing; What was R&D on that day, coz I recon the world would be a strange place if we all took some.

The ‘Comse, Comsa’ Card – Those cards that are nothing special, but could have their uses. Aven Envoy is a prime example in my mind because we all know there is a better version out there in the form of the Ornithopter, but because of colour, type and creature type, the envoy could be better for certain decks.

The ‘Solid Choice’ Card – These are those cards that make for good deck additions, such as Serra Angel and Grizzly Bear. A large number of cards fall into this category.

The ‘Powerful’ Card – These are cards that are ones most people would build a deck around, like the Bringers. This is the field that my vampire will slide into.

The ‘Oh-So Broken’ Card – These are those cards you would chop of your left arm to own. These are things like Black Lotus or the Moxes.

Please bear in mind, this is how I, personally value cards. Everyone has a different view and a different value system, so take this into consideration when reading this article.

So what power rating are we going to go for; how much do I want this card to rock the gaming scene were it ever to be printed. With different methods already in place covering all levels of the power scale (From the mighty heights of Aluren and Sneak Attack, to the dismal low of Hunting Ground) the world is my oyster.

But for some reason, I don’t want to push the envelope this time around; I just want to create a card that may have use to some people but which won’t be the “It” card of every deck. As such, I’ll be aiming for a card of ‘comme ci, comme ça’ standard – Sorry power gamers!

To create a balanced ability, you first must appreciate the value the existing cards in MTG place upon it; in other words we must research existing alternate play cards.

And for reference, we will not be keeping to the realm of enchantments with this ability: limiting your field of vision limits your understanding of the landscape.

Other cards of notes are: Cryptic Gateway, Elvish Piper, Hunting Grounds and Quicksilver Amulet.

Although this list is quite extensive, it is by no means a complete list of alternate play cards already existing in Magic; but it gives us a wide base from which to base or theory upon.

Some of these cards have been made famous in many a deck, broke the format wide open and had many a MTG player spending his entire paycheck just to possess one. And some weren’t so popular; they had their uses but didn’t really make that much of a lasting change.

Let’s take the two most popular cards first: Aluren and Sneak Attack. These cards are amazingly powerful – Just look at the infinite combo section of this very website and you will see what I mean.

Aluren gives every player the ability to play certain creatures for free at an instant speed; just consider that for a moment. Straight off there’s the obvious mana curve advantages, but it also removes all issues of summon sickness, makes counter spells useless as the card isn’t played and all this is your’s for just the small outlay of 2GG. Thing is, it’s that cost for you to give all those benefits to your opponent(s) as well; sure in 2HG it helps your ally as well but who wants to give a helping hand to their opponent?

Sneak Attack, whilst it has the same converted mana cost plays it solo: only you benefit from the power this card has. And what power it has indeed; a hasted creature of any cmc, type and shape for just one red mana. Sure it dies at the end of the turn but it’s still instant speed and it’s easier to play then Aluren as it’s less mana intensive; even though you have to keep paying R you had that when you played the spell in the first place so chances are you still have it.

Just to take a moment here, you will note that these two cards would denote the cost to play one creature card for free lies somewhere around a cmc of four. And as long as we’re willing to keep the cost of the creature low and we’re not too fussed about sharing this ability, then we don’t need to increase the cost at all.

A sudden thought has occurred to me and I feel it might be an avenue of research we really should tap into: Offering!

Offering was what we’d call a “small run ability” that featured in the Kamigawa block that in my mind had some real potential; it invoked the image of large rituals and ritualistic sacrifice that really captured the theme of the Kamigawa block.

Now this is a keyword and the intention of our Alt-Play enchantment was not to grant creatures a new ability; but it could easily be broken down and reworded to create a new ability.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I think we’ve found a new route to take this card’s ability. It’s balanced as you still need to pay some kind of cost and is restricted in its use so it won’t be playable in every deck – a perfect fit for our specifications.

But there is a small problem: What color does our ability take? In it original incarnation Offering appeared once in each color but this was mainly due to a flavor issue within the Kamigawa set – but we’re not building a full set (yet…) and I have no intention of making a five color enchantment as that would be the easy way out.

No, instead we need to break this ability down in the hope that some similarities to other abilities within the color pie will arise. When broken down into its simplest form, two keywords/phrases arise: Sacrifice and Mana Cost

Well Sacrifice is rather simple actually, as it falls into an aggressive and reckless stance but also shows a willingness to do what’s needed to get the job done: Surely this is the realm of Black and/or Red. But the more time you spend considering this, the more likely you will come to the same conclusion that I did; that this ability is a pure black ability. The main reason is, we’re sacrificing something to gain an advantage, some tangible effect or item that will remain in the game (Barring outside effects) – Red is really not in it for the long haul, it sacrifices for some instant speed ability such as burn or destruction of our opponents benefit. Even Red’s own poster child “alt-play” enchantment shows this willingness to get a “flash-fire” effect with creatures.

Mana cost is also rather simple as there are really only two types of cards that handle colour direct in the current, modern color pie and they are Green and Artifact. But again, if we consider the ability a little bit more we can only arrive at one color: Green. While artifacts are more than happy to give out mana, filter it and even rob us of our much needed mana; it’s not willing to give us an alternative to mana itself.

Having said that, Aether Vial does argue against this theory but the way I look at it is this: Aether Vial is one card in over fourteen thousand printed cards that does this for artifacts but how many Green cards make use of the term “without paying it’s mana cost” or some other method of free creatures? I rest my case there ladies and gentlemen.

So we now know that the ability to put free creatures of cmc three or less for everyone is a total cost of four, and we have also gathered that the ability we want to use is a Black/Green ability: But now we must consider what our ability doesn’t do.

For starters, we’re not restricting the cost of our creatures which is still costs a cmc of four if they only stay for one turn. Again, our ability is permanent; the creature will be there for as long as it takes for it to be removed by damage or effects so this signifies we need to increase our ability. Well, in order to get a fair value for this increase I advice we take a look at a more permanent effect card: Chord of Calling

Before we go any further let us address the convoke ability: The simple answer is that this ability increases the cost of any spell that features it by…. Nothing! Why nothing you ask? Simple; the ability is a very restrictive ability that only has any benefit if you build towards it. Let me explain; firstly you need a number of creatures in play which would have required some outlay of mana to play and which shares a color with the spell. Secondly, by tapping these creatures you have removed the chance of any other use from that creature for this turn that requires a tap, such as ping, attacking, mana abilities and activated abilities.

Okay; now we’ve climbed over that hill onto the next one, the fact that Chords makes use of an X in its cost. Well, our ability has an alternative to this ability in the form of the sacrifice and “pay the difference” which is actually just as powerful: You have still paid the full cost of the creature one way or another.

So that leaves us with a cost GGG for the ability to search our library for a creature and put it into play at instant speed; but we don’t want to search our deck so we must remove this from the card. And the quick answer to this is we must now drop our abilities cost to GG, as Worldly Tutor finds us our card at instant speed. Sure, the tutor only puts the card on top of the library but to balance this out Chords is incredibly mana intensive: Three colored mana is quite a steep call to make.

So let us recap: Our ability is still rated at a cmc of four, must be made up from a combination of Black and Green, must include GG in the cost and requires the player to sacrifice a specific creature and pay the remaining mana cost. All that remains to do is reword the ability and we’ve got our card! Or can we? You see, the problem we have is that our ability is more restricted then the initial cards we took this cmc of four from. We need to reduce our cost further in order to make the card more balanced and at least worth the play.

Firstly, we require that you sacrifice something in order to use this card: So you have a running cost far exceeding that required of you by Sneak Attack. Now we could argue a reduction of two but this would make a very cheap, effective card which we’re not after so we’ll make do with a reduction of one.

Secondly, we require a shared creature type; again this could reduce the cost by another one but this would still result in a far better card then we intended. As such, I suggest we just make the card slightly easier to cast. As it stands, our card would cost BGG and that’s not quite right for the overall feel of the card but since we want to make the card easier to play and it must feature both B and G in it’s cost we can change this to 1BG.

The art featured in this card is a piece called “Birth” by Paul Bielaczyc of Epilogue.net (Thank you FKIH for that little gem!).

So that’s another article in the bank; and I do apologize that it has been so long since I have given you, the site viewers anything to read – I hope to make amends for this in the near future but I do ask you allow me a little longer; moving house doesn’t leave much time to write articles and create cards.

Now here’s were I’m going to shake the structure up a bit; rather then give you a restricted list of cards that I will create, I’m going to ask you to submit a card idea either through the forum by posting here or via PM; or by email at LutherAD@hotmail.co.uk or Felixrpg@yahoo.co.uk. The closing date for this will be 1st October 2007, at which point I will randomly pick two or three of the submissions from the list with the intention of having a complete article out in time for mid-October. Between then and now, I will be working on other articles and projects for the site so don’t go too far – MDV’s resident Vampire has come back. And this time; The Fangs Are Out!

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